Panoramic Photos Stitching using Hugin

I have always had an interesting in shooting panoramic images for a long time.  In the past I shot using a Horizon 202 film camera, but have not used it for a while.  Now shooting digital it is easier than ever to stitch panoramic images.  Earlier this year, I shot a panoramic fashion shoot using a panoramic head.  Here an image from this shoot.

While working away in the US for 4 weeks, I had the opportunities to see some amazing sights and wanted to them using panoramic.  I did not have my pano head with me and shot the images hand held and used a free software called Hugin to stitched them together.  I was very surprised at it ability to stitch multiple hand held images together.  It has a lot of options to do fine adjustments and the results are very good, especially for a free software.  Here are my favorite images from my trip.

Pikes Peak, Colorado

Pikes Peak, Colorado

Dillon Lake, Colorado

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Loveland Pass, Colorado

I highly recommend this software for stitching panoramic images together.  It has served me very well on this trip.

Shooting on The Rock

I am working in the US at the moment and managed to shoot Neil (a co-working) in Dillon Colorado.  He wants some photos of him standing a rock.  This is a business trip so I did not carry a lot of stuff with me.  I fitted my Nikon SB26 a monopod and it was held by hand with a helper.  I use on my PT04 radio trigger to trigger the flash.  For this shoot, I used my 50mm f1.8 lens on my Canon 550D.

One evening after work, we went to a couple of rocks I saw a few days before with Neil and our assistant Peter.  The location is steep and full of rocks.  There was no way a light stand can be used.  Peter will have to had hold the flash attached to a monopod.

Peter holding flash attached to monopod

The condition was overcast which made it easy to under expose the ambient condition.  I shot at 1/200s at f8 and had the flash zoomed to 24mm at 1/2 power.  IThe shoot was very short and only lasted 30 minutes, but we got some great shots.  I am very happy with the results.

Postcards from Phoenix Arizona

For the last couple of weeks, I've been in Phoenix Arizona working in the heat of summer.  It is very hot and I did not push myself to shoot out in the heat.  However, I did managed to go out a few time to shoot in downtown Phoenix and a couple of attractions.

I've to say, there are not a lot of interesting stuff to shoot in the city itself.  Most of the interesting stuff are out in the desert which I did not have the time to go out to.  Here are a few photos I shot which I think are worthwhile.

The Hole in The Rock Phoenix

View from The Hole in The Rock

Civic Space Park

Interesting structure in the park called "Her Secret Is Patience"

View from below.  The sculpture is by Janet Echelman 

View from another angle

I am hoping to take more photos from this trip very soon.

Summer Shoot in Russell Square

I had a quick photo shoot with the lovely Ali Valenzuela in a park near Russell Square in London at the weekend.  The idea was to shoot some summer type images.  The weather was unpredictable with wind, rain, sun and cloud.  It made accurate exposure more difficult as lighting was changing all the time.  I’ve decided to shoot the images with my 85mm f1.8 lens at f1.8 as much as possible for shallow DOF.  At times I had to put a polarizing filter on the lens to reduce the shutter speed below 1/250s.

Shooting at f1.8 made focus critical.  With the model moving between poses, it resulted in quite a few out of focus images.  I had to shoot a lot more images than normal to make sure there were a good enough selection of images in focus to choose from.

Again, I used my Strobeam DL4 lighting kit with my 43” umbrella softbox for lighting.  I was using very low power so I could have used my speedlites, but decided I was to large modifier.  This is the second time I created this shallow DOF over exposed look.  I think it has its place but don’t want to over use it.  I am going to wait a while before shooting in this style again.

A Shoot in the Park

The British summer have yet to really start this year, but at least the temperature is starting to warm.  I made use of a break in weather this week and did a shoot with the beautiful Ema Sol.  She is originally from Slovakia.  I wanted to do a shoot in the park in late evening.

We met up in St James Park near Buckingham Palace for this shoot.  I decided to shoot with my 85mm f1.8 lens as wide open as possible while keeping my flash sync speed to 1/200s.  I was in luck as it was a cloudy evening and under the tree, I was able to shoot at f1.8 at 1/200s at ISO 100. This mean the images were over exposed by 0.5 stop and some highlight was blown out.  I had a polarizing filter with me in case I had to reduce the ambient light level, but did not use it.  When I saw the test image on the LCD, I was very happy with the results.  By shooting at f1.8, the bokeh was dream like and beautiful which complemented the slight over exposure.  I was traveling very light and I only took my camera body, flash trigger, 50mm f1.8, 85mm f1.8, a light stand and a Canon 540EZ flash with me.  I didn't even take any light modifier with me.  Ema needed the smallest amount of fill flash which I think was 1/64 power.

Ema was a delight to work with.  She arrived in immaculate make up and hair styled as agreed before hand.  She needed very little help with posing and I was very happy with the resulting images.  Here are a few of my favorite photos from this shoot.  I must use the 85mm f1.8 lens much more and wide open.

Shooting in The Arctic Circle

I was in Rovaniemi, a town on the edge of Artic Circle in Finnish Lapland for two weeks on a business trip.  I always photograph my trips, but this time I wanted to do something different.  As well as photography I also want to produce a time lapse video.  With that in mind, I took my Olympus E-PL1 with me.  I decided I will only take the kit lens with me.  For video work, I much prefer the Pentax manual focus lenses, but for trip I took the kit lens and a table top tripod.  From my past experience the temperature at reach -35°C.  I know I do not want to change lens at that temperature.

Since the E-PL1 does not have an interval meter built in, I had to improvise.  What I did was to set the camera to continuous shooting mode, set the Anti Shock delay to 2s.  The anti shock function was designed to add a time delay between pressing the shutter button and actually taking a photo.  After setting up the camera as I want it, I use a rubber band to wrap around the shutter button and added a small coin to keep the button pressed.

Since the images were going to be imported into video editing software and the final video will be viewed on TV or computer, I set the image size to 16:9 ratio and shot at low resolution.  Once the start the camera shooting, I just left it to carry on until I got enough footage.

As well as time lapse images I also took quite a lot of video footage.  In the end, I had to edit most of them out, otherwise it will be an overlong video.  I used Sony Vegas HD 11 to produce my video and found it quite difficult to use.  It is a powerful piece of software and I will try to master it.  I am sure it will get easier with use.

I love the creativity of video and time lapse and definitely want to work on this much more in future.  The video I produced from my trip to Finland can be viewed on Vimeo.  I hope you like it.

As well and time lapse photography, I also took some panoramic images.  Here are a couple of examples of panoramic photos from this trip.

Frozen Lake near Rovaniemi

Ounusvaara Ski Slope Rovaniemi

My Experience with using Olympus E-PL1 for Photos and Videos

I've had my E-PL1 for over 6 months now and I really like using it.  Like all cameras it does have its weaknesses.  I have listed the main weaknesses and what I've done to overcome it.

1. Focus speed – Not a lot I can do, but don't expect DSLR speed and forget moving objects.
2. Low light focusing – It can be an issue in a dark pub, but not a lot you can do apart from carrying a small LED light.
3. Hard to see LCD screen in daylight.  This is a problem even in cloudy days let alone on a bright sunny day.  I have purchased a Delkin Pop Up Shade.  The 2.7" universal shade fits really well.  So far, it worked really well on a cloudy day.  Where as before I had to turn up the brightness to the max on a cloudy day, I did not have to do anything with the shade on.  I've yet used it on a sunny day, but it can only make it better.
4. Maximum shutter speed is only 1/2000s which limit the use of fast lens on a sunny day.  I intent to buy a ND filter for get round this problem.

I've been getting more into video since I got the E-PL1 because it is very small.  Even though I have two DSLR that can take better videos, I've not bother to use them for video at all.  I was lucky enough to be given two Pentax K mount manual focus lenses.  One is an Itorex 28mm F2.8, the other a Pentax 50mm F2.  When I shoot videos, I normally use one of them simply I like the smooth manual focus which you can not do with the kit lens.  I am also able to create better bokeh with these lenses.  To demonstrate, I've shot a very short video on a very wet London on New Year day 2012.

E-PL1 fitted with Itorex 28mm F2.8 with Pentax 50mm F2 on the side. 

I normally shoot video in manual mode while using the E-PL1 as I like to know exactly what the camera is doing.  I found ISO only goes up to 1600 in video mode.  I would like to be able to go up to ISO 3200.  The extra stop would be very useful.  To combat shooting in a dark room, I have purchased a 160 LED video light from Amazon.  The light is day light balanced (5500k) and it comes with three diffusers.  They are white diffuser, orange and pink.  The white diffuser is great to soften the light indoor and not blind the people you are filming.  The orange diffuser is balanced for tungsten.  While the pink on is balanced for florescent light.  You probably will not use the LED light bare unless it’s a super bright day and you want to fill out any shadow.

I've only played with the video light at home and a couple of Christmas parties.  I am still learning about colour balance when using video lights and will update my blog once I know more.